Author of ‘IBM and the Holocaust’ Takes Apart NIF Funding Sources in New Book (INTERVIEW)

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Author Edwin Black.

In a new book by Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust, the Jewish writer grapples with the New Israel Fund, unraveling its financial sources and, ultimately, connecting U.S. tax payers to programs that de-legitimize Israel and the Israel Defense Forces.

“Financing the Flames” takes a hard look at the many non-profits funded by NIF, the role of the historically anti-Semitic Ford Foundation in propagating hate materials in 2000 and 2001, and how that ethos and funding transformed into NIF. Black also highlights many of the grievances long made by watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch and others, showing general readers the payments, effectively subsidized by U.S. tax payers, and received every month by Arab terrorists sitting in Israeli jails.

In an interview with The Algemeiner, Black said, “Certainly, many in the media […] will have heard some of these stories, but for most Americans, this is all inside baseball that needed to be exposed. People in Congress and, more importantly, the people who fund Congress, are in the dark on this pivotal issue.”

Black has written ten best-selling books, but his most famous remains “IBM and the Holocaust,” which he said was the model for “Financing the Flames.”

At the Washington, D.C., Holocaust Museum, “there had been at least 6 million tourists in there before me, and they all saw the giant IBM machine, it’s the first artifact in the museum,” Black said. “Not until I looked into it, and found they organized the whole Holocaust, that IBM was involved at every level; it was more than just selling a few machines to the Nazis.”

“What ‘Financing the Flames’ does is shine a bright spotlight on all sorts of misuses of tax payer funds, really, the perversion of American tax payer moneys intended to promote peace is actually financing culture of confrontation,” Black said.

“American tax payers don’t realize they are indirectly paying salaries of convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons on a sliding scale that increases in proportion to their heinous crime,” Black said.

NIF’s wide range of beneficiaries “are influencing the political process, trying to erase Jewish identity, while many of their American donors don’t realize the negative impact it’s having,” he said.

Black said, as a historian, his work has focused on clarifying what happened in the past, so it’s not repeated. Now, he sees a systematic destruction of what we thought we knew about history, to modify the future.

“At the core of it, these people are stealing our past, first, so they can rob us of our future.”